Monday, August 24, 2009

Goat Cheese Raviolis

So I have a few things bookmarked in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and one of them is ravioli. Yes, I am crazy enough to make my own ravioli. I wanted to do it, but at the same time was dreading it - I just had this bad feeling that it was going to be a huge disaster. When I finally got started, I started to feel a little better about it.

I replaced half of the all-purpose flour with white whole wheat flour. I was too nervous to replace it all on the first try, but I knew I could safely replace half. I used the food processor to make the dough. It was dry, so I added a little water as the directions called for. The whole wheat flour definitely made a firmer dough, I think.

Since I don't have a pasta machine, I had to roll the dough by hand with a rolling pin. At this point I kept asking myself what was I thinking making my own damn pasta! It is ridiculously difficult to roll the dough thin enough. You have to roll it over and over. Towards the end, I started rolling it, cutting it in half, rolling out the half, cutting that in half, and rolling another half... you get the idea. It worked, because my first few raviolis were a little on the thick side and they got thinner as I went along. But towards the end, I gave up entirely. The dough became too elastic to work with. Luckily I had plenty of raviolis by this point so I just threw the rest away.

I put them all on a baking sheet, separated, and kept them in the fridge for a few hours until I was ready to cook them. They cooked very quickly, about 3 minutes or so, but we also had to cook them in batches of about 8 at a time.

As it turns out, we only ate about 6 raviolis each, and I made around 30. If I had known that they would be so filling, I probably would have frozen the rest instead of cooking them, but hopefully the raviolis reheat well. The cooked raviolis stuck together and a few ripped when I tried to put them in a tupperware.

Reminder for next time: buy pre-made ravioli. Or at least a pasta rolling machine.